St Barnabas, Hove St Agnes Feast 21.1.22

Our thoughts determine our lives.

Be they self-centred, neighbour-centred or God-centred - and they’re bound to be a mixture of all three for believers.

Controlling our thoughts is difficult. We can’t easily do it because they’re a river flowing through our minds. The danger is seizing a wrong one and implementing it on impulse. Our more measured thoughts help life flow well. Our best thoughts are the making of us and of the world. 

So flowed my own thoughts looking at the martyrdom of St Agnes, a 12 year old girl we know little about save her paying the highest price for chaste thoughts and, being named after Jesus Lamb of God, becoming an icon of self offering. Her story is of a Christian girl resolved to stay single for the sake of the Gospel, who, threatened by an aggressive suitor, is forced into a legal conflict. Agnes’ faith went on trial during the Diocletian persecutions of 304 AD. Her name, mentioned in the oldest eucharistic prayer, means chaste in Greek and lamb in Latin hence our two themes of purity and self-sacrifice.

Being a retired priest gives me more time for relaxation and conversation and - thank you Fr John - attending and leading worship. The other day I got into a conversation with a 21 year old lad who confided in me his decision to turn away from the pornography so many of his friends were getting immersed in. ‘I don’t want my future relationships spoiled’ he said with telling wisdom. 

Our thoughts determine our lives. St Augustine captured the damage done in his lustful youth when he talked of memory being ‘a sad privilege’. Many of us know first hand the truth he speaks of. Thoughts of things from the past intrude the flow of our thinking and fuel action destructive of our relationships. The Feast of St Agnes is a call to purity of thought, word and deed including custody of the eyes and the avoidance of salacious television and reading material.

Secondly, today’s Saint calls us to think on her namesake Jesus Agnus dei. This image may be familiar to some of us - show book ‘The Bound Lamb’ by Francisco de Zurbarin who lived in the 17th century.  It’s an image that often appears on Nativity scenes, the Shepherds’ offering which anticipates Christ’s sacrifice. As Jeremy Paxman wrote in the Church Times of this painting: ‘no image I know so perfectly captures the astonishing force of the Christian story’. Jesus fulfils the sacrifice of the Old Testament Passover Lamb whose blood daubed on doors  protected the households of believers. Unlike the Old Testament lambs, Our Lord’s sacrifice is voluntary and as such takes away sin.  Our Lord on Calvary takes the full force of sin and death for us at the cost of his life. 

Today on our patronal feast we make the memorial of the Offering of Jesus and enter into that Self-Offering. It is through the sacrificial Lamb of God that we can make a perfect offering to the Father, our sinful bodies made clean by his body..our souls washed through his most precious blood. There is a deep continuity between the sacrifices of the Old Testament - Abel, Abraham and Melchizedek - the offering of Jesus the Lamb of God, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our own sacrificial living as Christians. They all hang together. In a culture full of self-interest what we are about this evening is powerfully counter-cultural. Here, in union with Christ, we are offering our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice 

As St Agnes teaches, sacrifice is at heart about voluntary choice about how we direct our lives - it is about love before it is about death.  It is about joyous living just as sure as ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. It is not so much about forgoing what we desire but of binding our energies to what God desires. 

Our thoughts determine our lives - be they indulgent or geared to purity and sacrifice.

A couple of practical suggestions to help order our thinking and action more into those two qualities of St Agnes captured in her name, one about using the Jesus Prayer and another about making a Morning Offering. 

Repeating under our breath the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ is very powerful, as people have found praying it for 1500 years. It's a succinct summary of faith with capacity to empower us against useless and harmful thoughts. The power in the name of Jesus is such that, when we are tempted by base thoughts, repetition of this prayer sees them fly away. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’. We need the will to pray, but knowing and using this prayer is a key aid to purity. 

Secondly the Morning Offering. The idea is to sit on your bed as soon as you get up and, whilst letting the blood reach your head, get into gear spiritually by praying something like, ‘Lord, I thank you for who you are and your love for me and all that is. I give myself to you. Take me and use me for your praise and service and the building up of the body of Christ. Come, Holy Spirit'. When you have made such a prayer at the start of the day you recognise spiritual needs and opportunities around you and the hand of God working in your life in the hours that follow. I know this from when I forget to pray it - my day turns rather useless! The Morning Offering is linked to Christ’s Offering and invitation to join in it at Mass where we pray, ‘May he make of us an eternal offering to you’.

Our thoughts determine our lives. May the prayer of St Agnes inspire us to take continual battle against bad thoughts and make of our lives an ever more complete offering to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and henceforth and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Lent 5 Holiness 22nd March 2015

I only point the way - a sign doesn't have to go where it points.

As your parish priest I am a pointer to holiness through my special dress and functions and it’s not surprising the devil puts that one liner into my mind.

I only point the way - a sign doesn't have to go where it points.

No, no, no. If I’m ever a sad priest my sadness should most of all be about not being a saintly one.

I must persevere in self-sacrifice, in guarding myself from ritual service in the empty sense of 'go where I point but not here I go. Do as I say but not as I do'.

This little confession is my way into today's readings on self-sacrifice. 

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. John 12:24

Sometimes the office of a priest requires you to challenge your people and, especially then, it's all the more important your own failings are being challenged, through counsel you seek and receive, lest you contradict the message you provide.

We priests, we Christians, need to turn our eyes upon Jesus who both challenged and gave himself. 

Today's readings are haunted by Gethsemane.

The Gospel: my soul is troubled. The epistle from Hebrews which states in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest. Hebrews 5:7-10

In Gethsemane Jesus made self-sacrifice. 'Nevertheless' he says - and what wonders in that word - 'nevertheless, Father, not my will but thine be done'.

Holiness is linked to self-sacrifice. You can't be a sign of Christ without it. And it's a 24-7 business that permeates thought, word and deed.

The writer A.J.Cronin tells of Olwen Davies, a middle-aged district nurse whose cheerful service of the people of Tregenny impressed him in his days as medical officer to a Welsh mining company. Cronin was so worried about her low pay he brought it up in conversation after a strenuous day they'd shared together. 'Why don't you make them pay you more? It's ridiculous you should work for so little?' She smiled. 'I've got enough to get along with'. 'No, really, God knows you're worth an extra pound a week at least'. There was a pause. 'Doctor if God knows I'm worth it, that's all that matters to me'.

What is worthiness? It's a similar question to that about holiness. Unworthiness is a shade easier to define, maybe as living just for yourself. John Ruskin said when a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package. 

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Seeing our organ dismantled reminded me of the magnetic islands in the Arabian Knights tale which wrecked ships by drawing out their nails and bolts. When people live just to themselves their lives fall to pieces in the end, just like our organ, but not constructively but destructively. 

Lives magnetised by God are held together with joy. Can you think of anyone who has attained joy, permanent happiness, without self denial?

I can think of a few folk I've met over my years as a priest who've regretted their occupation with selfish pursuits, nominally in their bread winner role, which ended up excluding those now grown but nominally near and dear to them. 

Passiontide challenges us with the way of sacrifice followed by Jesus and invited of us as the sure path from self-centredness into holiness.

The famous Christian writer CS Lewis wrote of his 'bewilderment and amazement' after the death of his wife: 'If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards... If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled 'Illness', 'Pain', 'Death', 'Loneliness'. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find it didn't'

Elsewhere he summarises this trauma which showed the need for his faith to mature, saying of God 'he always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realise the fact was to knock it down'. 

Lewis' words 'bewilderment and amazement' are words used in the Gospel of Jesus in Gethsemane facing the supreme sacrifice of himself for us all. All the little and all the big challenges to our self interest must be measured up to this if we want to be holy. For Lewis it was the pain of bereavement through which skin deep cerebral faith gave way to something deeper, but only at a price to his self interest.

A sign doesn't have to go where it points. The sign of the Cross is 'I' crossed out. We can't get around that, but we try to!

It's quite natural to shy away from suffering and many times it's right to do so, and what a blessing it is to read in scripture how Jesus himself, in his full humanity, shied away from suffering. He offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death and the way he was heard by God was in grace to accept that Cup into which was poured all evil for him to drink to the dregs on Calvary.

You and I take his Sunday Cup so we can more willingly take the Cup he supplies Monday to Saturday. This is supplied by life, by those near and dear, as well as those put on our hearts from our neighbourhood including the agonies presented daily on the screens in our living places.

Our quest for joy is inseparable from self-sacrifice and is aided by our growing closer to Jesus whose dying and rising are made part of us in baptism and its weekly renewal in the Sacrament of his body and blood. 

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.